Ototoxicity

[dteresa]

This is something I never heard of. Apparently there are several meds and classes of meds that can cause hearing loss or other problems like tinnitus. I have taken some of these and was never ever warned about this side effect. I do remember that my mother, who was very hard of hearing and required a hearing aid from the time she was a fairly young woman, told me that her hearing loss was caused by quinine that she took for an illness when she was younger. Quinine is one of those ototoxic substances.

This is especially true for kidney patients who are more susceptible.

Risk factors include medication dose, therapy duration, cumulative lifetime dose, impaired kidney function, infusion rate of certain medications, coadministration of multiple ototoxic meds, age, previous exposure to head and neck radiation, genetic susceptibility, and family history of ototoxicity. Older adults are especially susceptible due to factors that can contribute to drug accumulation in the body.

Common ototoxic meds are aminoglycosides including streptomycin and neomycin, chemotherapeutic agents, NSAIDS, salicylates including aspirin, loop diuretics given intravenously, quinine, erythromycin, anesthetics, cardiac medication, glucocorticosteroids and mood altering drugs.

The FDA does not have good clinical practice guidelines for monitoring in the clinical trials of new drugs. Testing is not typically required unless the new agent is within the class of drugs known to cause ototoxicity.

More good news from the world of pharmaceuticals.

didi

[wade4veg]

This is something I never heard of. Apparently there are several meds and classes of meds that can cause hearing loss or other problems like tinnitus. I have taken some of these and was never ever warned about this side effect.

Ototoxicity is a much broader subject than just involving hearing. The same drugs that can affect hearing can also damage the parts of the inner ear that affect balance. Inside your semi-circular canals there are little nerve hairs over which the fluid flows as you move your head. Like seaweed in the ocean as the waves roll over them. Those nerves let you know what side is up, or what motion is occurring. They let you feel that you are moving.
Even more important they allow your head to move while making brain adjustments for your eyes to track the movements without feeling like you are watch a cheap video using a low quality camera. All that jumping in the video.
All that goes on in your inner ear without you even being aware of it.
Ototoxicity can damage all those functions in addition to hearing.

Ototoxcity is the reason Rush Limbaugh lost his hearing and now has a cochlear implant.
Though he has never admitted the drugs (pain killlers) that he was hooked on caused the hearing loss.
Almost certainly they did.

One other group of drugs some susceptible men need to be aware of, are the Viagra, Cialis, etc. drugs.
If you listen to the ads, in addition to the 4 hour erection problem, they also mention "any sudden loss of hearing"
The problem is that it can happen very rapidly and there is most often no cure or way to lessen the damage.

Actually the loss of the function of the inner ears... balance, movement perception, can be far more of a problem than loss of hearing. Imagine you felt like you were always on a sailboat...up and down....
Or imagine when you watched TV or a film, and you felt like you were actually experiencing all that movement because your eyes are tell you it is happening, but your damaged inner ears don't tell you that you are sitting still in your seat.
Lots more to ototoxicity than just hearing loss.

[VeggieSue]

Nerve damage is how I became hard of hearing as a child. Like your mom, Didi, I, too, have had hearing aids since a young age. I had frequent sinus and ear infections that went under treated with antibiotics but over treated with baby aspirin. Because I was a fat baby and toddler, my mom would always give me a higher dose because my fever wouldn't go down with the normal dose. She hesitated to take any of us to the doctor for antibiotics because they were so expensive. The local pharmacists would sell parents a one day supply and give them more if the kids needed it. Nobody got a full 10 day round of antibiotics back then, especially in families with 3 or more kids. Things were so different in the 1950's than they are today.

But knowing what we do now about how meds affect hearing, I do check everything out when a new med is prescribed. My doc's practice always sponsors student docs doing clinical, so whenever a med is mentioned, all I have to do is ask if it has any ototoxicity and the students all grab their devices (They used to be issued Blackberries, but now the all have their own smartphones) and check it out for me and the doc before he orders it.

[dteresa]

Is this something most of us have ever heard of from their doctor? I doubt it. I have never ever been given any drug for which the doctor mentions side effects. Nowadays you get an insert from the pharmacy with drug information. However, as with any drug, we are mostly guinea pigs because mild or serious side effects are not always discovered in clinical trials and are discovered after thousands of people have taken the drug and MAYBE reported a side effect. I bet lots of times people do not even report a side effect of a drug.

didi

[RAS22]

Yes,it very true,mds.don't realise the effect of drugs on our ears.I do not hear without
my aids in at all.My pharmasist has my chart highlighted to look up any ototoxic meds my
dr. orders.(don't go very often). Neil G.Bauman has a book listing ototoxic drugs.called
Ototoxic Drugs Exposed.It very informative. RAS

[EvanG]

My father has had tinnitus and Meniere's disease, where balance is pretty much lost in sudden attacks.

Ironically, ototoxicity pretty much cured his Meniere's disease through this procedure described on Wikipedia:

The ototoxicity of gentamicin can be exploited to treat some individuals with Ménière's disease by destroying the inner ear, which stops the vertigo attacks but causes permanent deafness.

He is now pretty much deaf in one ear, but doesn't suffer from Meniere's, which was a great trade-off for him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ototoxicity

[VeggieSue]

Is this something most of us have ever heard of from their doctor? I doubt it. I have never ever been given any drug for which the doctor mentions side effects.

None of my docs do, either. It's up to *me* to ask, not only about the ears but how they affect the liver, as I also have fatty liver, and many meds, even at the lowest dosage, cause my liver enzymes to rise.

[soul food]

Gee, I haven't heard about this ototoxicity and hearing loss.

soul food

[VeggieSue]

Gee, I haven't heard about this ototoxicity and hearing loss.

People with normal hearing don't even think about things like this, so don't feel bad.

[healthyvegan]

Happened to me. Horrible tinnitus. Was given an ototoxic erythromycin for an ear infection. Hoping stem cells could help some day... I always think about wearing a speaker broadcasting the high pitch ring I hear so others would understand it, but I'm certain that would be the end of any friends! Maybe one day a year "share in my tinnitus day" lol